The paintings of Bendt Eyckermans (born 1994, Antwerp) are unsettling due to the visible tension between poetic and pragmatic visual components. For example, romantic skies are combined with shiny car bodies, a carpet is being vacuumed in the middle of the picture plane, a pair of hands float above a woman’s head, a cameraman kneels to film what is outside the frame. The contradictory combination of expressive plastic forms and the intimate vulnerability that the characters in his work radiate is intriguing.
A friendly personage walks down the street with a mysterious object in his hand, disembodied limbs move energetically through the public space and a sculpture has fallen over peacefully. For Eyckermans, this interplay of imagination and disillusionment is a reason to create wonderfully painted and poignant scenes that give shape to the confusion of our time, but are equally anchored in art history.
In 2020, “A dream of thirst” (Posture Editions N° 37) was published, an overview of Eyckermans’ early work up to 2020. Posture Editions is honoured to publish a second book that can be considered a sequel to “A dream of thirst”. The new book contains some thirty works on paper and more than fifty oil paintings created over a period of five years. The book features two new essays on the painter’s work: Guillaume Blanc-Marianne discusses the mystery that surrounds the paintings, while Pietro Scammacca focuses on their cinematic qualities by framing the work within the art history of cinema.
Book launch: Sun. 23 Nov. at S.M.A.K. Ghent At 11 am, there will be a conversation between Bendt Eyckermans and Pietro Scammacca (in English), followed by a musical performance.
“The atmosphere is nebulous, twilight-bound – symptomatic of a moment when the city has nearly emptied itself. A crime may perhaps have been committed, though no one knows what harm it caused or who the culprit might be; yet there lingers, unmistakably, a heavy atmosphere of suspicion, the kind in which silence is disturbed only by brief and anxious whispers speaking of conspiracy, collusion, scheming.” Guillaume Blanc-Marianne in Bendt Eyckermans. Selected Works 2020–2025
